1. Technical Field
This disclosure generally relates to content management systems, and more specifically relates to indicating review activity of a document in a content management system.
2. Background Art
A content management system (CMS) allows many users to efficiently share electronic content such as text, audio files, video files, pictures, graphics, etc. Content management systems typically control access to content in a repository. A user may generate content, and when the content is checked into the repository, the content may be subsequently processed by the CMS according to predefined rules. A user may also check out content from the repository, or link to content in the repository while generating content. The rules in a CMS assure that content that comes into or out of the system or that is linked to meets desired criteria specified in the rules.
In a CMS environment, workflows are often used to facilitate the review and approval process of content in a document. When a document goes through a review and approval workflow, each of the elements that make up the document may be reviewed and approved independently before the document is approved as a whole. During this process reviewers can log their comments as annotations for each element. Some elements in the document may have more annotations or revisions than others. For example, if an element contains important or complex information, it is more likely to be highly scrutinized by reviewers than a standard element, such as a copyright statement. In the prior art, when a user creates a new document in a content management system, the user has no idea whether elements similar to the ones they are creating or linking to in the document have been subjected to significant or minimal annotations or revisions in previous documents of the same type. Without a way to indicate to a user review activity of past documents when creating a new document or rendering an existing document of the same type, known content management systems will not provide such indications to a user and thus the user may not be aware of potential review activity for a given element.